Search

My Other Blog

My NYT Bestseller!

What's a Wreck?

A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.

Jen and I have a thing we do when we're filing submissions. If a cake doesn't make immediate sense, I'll make the file name "supposed to be..." so Jen knows the context. It's my favorite kind of submission. So here are some "supposed to be..." cakes, let's see if you can figure them out:

Pretty confusing, right?

Because it was supposed to say "Happy 60th, Carolyn!"

The title of this next email was "WHO IS SID?!?!"

So, you know, there's your hint:

Yup. It was supposed to say "Happy 3rd Birthday, Ariella"

(We still don't know who Sid is.)

How 'bout this one?

The writing's fine, but those are supposed to be cow spots.

(In the baker's defense, they do look like something that comes out of cows, so I guess that's close.)

Reader Comments (8)

1) Maybe there were two women named Carolyn and they just happened to share the same birthday. If that's the case, then it's bad grammar, but when haven't we seen bad grammar on Cake Wrecks?2) Maybe Sid is a nickname. Maybe Ariella is a last name and they realized they couldn't put that all on one line. Or maybe I'll just sidstep this one and quit trying to make excuses for the bakers.3) In keeping with the theme of things that come out of cows, is this a commentary on the anniversary? 4) Two things come to mind here. One is that Route 66 is on the way out and there's no way of saving it. The other is that this is a society that lets people live one year after retirement age and then that's it.

I’m a 🇬🇧 and been living in Canada 🇨🇦 for 25years now. My accent has rounded off quite a bit. When I went into good old Dairy Queen to order the cake, I actually repeated the message twice - just in case! Apparently I should have written it instead. Everyone else thought it was pretty funny..... my husband - not so much.

Don't kid yourself, Deb. How many of these wrecks come from written messages? In cake #1 the baker looked at '60th' and somehow saw 'both'. I strongly suspect Sid was a mistake for '3rd' - maybe the client wanted it written twice, on each side of the picture? If a baker is prepared to write '66 to die!' on a cake without thinking twice, anything's possible.